#hatboyproject

It's so wonderful that people continue to have positive experiences with the work I've done. I read every comment and every message -- I just don't always get a chance to reply!

I'm particularly proud of the consistency in feedback that I receive about matching the "voice" of the game. Mass Effect is written in a particular way and I've tried very hard to make it all feel like it belongs.

My work is absolutely the definition of a fanfiction mod. I don't think it gets much more fanfiction than what I'm doing -- but what's canon, in the end? It's fanfiction with legitimacy, and Mass Effect is all about crafting your own version of Shepard. BuoWare has said it before; every Shepard is "the real Shepard."

To be completely fair to me, it was the "Watching from the sidelines... what do you think about me and you?" line.

That is a very important line.

It's never quite sat right with me, though. In the original, I kept it so close to the vanilla line as, frankly, a kind of exercise in personal vindication. I wanted that line that had made me so sad so many years ago to instead spark joy with just one subtle flick.

But, I think rephrasing it works better. As it is, it's kind of awkwardly worded for such a personally revealing question. The original question is he's asking Shepard about what they think about him and EDI. It makes sense to be so blunt about it if it's about someone else. But this is the moment where Jeff properly lets his guard down for the first time, even if only partially, and only for a moment. Jokes and deflection will surely follow, but this question has to be real. So, we can do better. Jeff can do better.

I'm not agonising over every piece of the script to this same level of detail. If I did that, we'd be here until ME5 or whatever.

I would like to get this finished for N7 Day this year. Even in saying this, chances are high that I won't make that goal, but I'd very much like to aim for it. If I knuckle down and work on this every day, I stand a good chance of having something at least presentable by then.

I'm of two minds on whether I want to release video dailies or not, when I get to that point with this scene. On the one hand, keeping it a surprise and booting it all out the door at once would be exciting. On the other, seeing people get excited for my work gives me so much energy and motivation that I can really use. But then again, honestly, I'd also rather not kick the hornet's nest too much in terms of getting attention from people who don't understand what I'm doing, and are hostile to it. That's a concern, too!

I never did finish that follow-up video I intended to do about the talking points that arose from my meeting with the president of NAVA some years ago, but I think there could be value in laying all that out, because there still are a lot of misconceptions even as the debate has moved in different directions now.

Here's a look at the brains of Hatboy, one layer deep. All the nodes raining down from the top left are things I set up today. Stuff coiled up in the bottom left is unused vanilla conversation that I clipped out. All that is new dialogue and logic gates (if this, he says this, if that, he says that) and Shepard's dialogue choices. I'm not even done setting up the conversation flow, I still have to find a way to make a few branches loop back or terminate properly. Laying out the dialogue in the editor always makes me catch things that I can't catch in the flat script stage. I HAVE FORGOTTEN TO EAT TODAY YET AGAIN. (It's fine, I splurged and got pizza.)

Fully half of that stuff is just "And then you dated this person, so I didn't want to approach you back then" and then it checks for whether or not the previous partner is dead, so that Jeff can be either gently sensitive about asking if Shepard wants to move on, or he can be a nervous piece of shit and stammer through asking you if you're still a thing with them or not.

I, in my infinite wisdom and definitely not hubris, insisted on making Jeff refer to previous relationships by name, specifically. The infrastructure was there, so why not use it? That was my reasoning. So, I've had to ensure that the game can check for every possible combination of relationships, plus fallbacks for the Shepard who remained single up until now, and it all has to tonally match and flow from one line to the next without sounding weird. I also have taken care to ensure that every dialogue path is roughly the same amount of replies as any other, so the player isn't punished with less story for choosing any specific route.

Why have I done this.

On the positive side, making him refer to the character by name makes it all feel more intelligent and personalised. On the negative side, LOOK AT THAT SPAGHETTI and I'm not even done winding up the conversation.

It's been nice that I can just carefully recreate the camera work from the scene on the original 2012 edition ME3, because Exkywor did a beautiful job reframing a few key moments that would be a real pain to lose out on.

I've got two questions for you

1. How much more content is the legendary edition going to have, ie (scenes, dialogue) besides the whole 2 gender availability?

2. After the HatBoy project is completed would you ever consider adding some content to Mass Effect 2 (LE) for his romance? Maybe not a full romance but like subtle hints at underlying feelings?

Keep up the great work, what you are doing is truly art with the amount of work and animation and everything.

Stay safe and healthy!

Hi, thanks for asking questions! Answering them is fun.

So, as for how much more content, there's already more content than the original alpha release. Whilst not everything the alpha has is in place just yet, there are several new conversations that were never in the alpha version that already work. I've attempted to give Jeff something more to say after every key mission.

One of the biggest new additions is going to be the conversation I'm planning about Jeff's sister. It always bothered me that you can find out what happened to her, but can't tell him. He's left hanging forever on that one. I want to fix that.

The second big addition is that I'd like a romanced Jeff to be an option for the Citadel date. I'd like him to be able to distract the guards, etc.

There are also some small remarks and things from other characters that can be recontextualised so that they acknowledge what's happening, too. As an example, at one point Javik can remark on Shepard's relationship with "the pilot." Obviously, this remark is about a relationship with Cortez, but the remark is fortunately generic enough that I'm editing it so if the player is dating Joker, that line will be used. Mordin has a conversation over the radio with Jeff that requires tweaking, too. I did that in the alpha version, but I can do it more cleanly, now - I couldn't lipsync salarians before, and the chopped up voice line could use it.

I'm looking forward to editing the Citadel DLC in a number of ways, including making content to account for other mods the user may have installed. (Not looking forward to sorting out the immense sequencing spaghetti that is the group photo, but I did it once for the alpha by examining coaxionunlimited's work with Samara, so I can do it again.)

I suppose, broadly speaking, the entirety of the LE version is new content really, because with few exceptions, I've changed the scripts for every conversation I touch. Some lines are the same, just with updated audio. But for the most part, I've really treated the alpha version like a draft.

No pressure, I was just curious at what the possible upcoming release will contain!

Stay healthy! /⁠ᐠ⁠｡⁠ꞈ⁠｡⁠ᐟ⁠\

Yes, mShep content is included and will be completely playable on the LE version release. In fact, just today I've been dealing with splicing together his audio in the Flux Bar scene I'm working on. In case you haven't seen it, though, reader, above is one of my scenes running in LE featuring a discussion with mShep. The only reason I didn't include mShep content for the alpha version was that it was a monstrous amount of extra work to do. Because the majority of that project was built before I reverse-engineered the automated lip-sync animation for these games, it all had to be done by hand, through blind but meticulous guesswork. Because the vocal tracks are different, spoken by different people with different timing, every line would've required animating by hand twice over. At the time, every single Shepard line would've taken me somewhere around 6-8 hours of extra work if I had included mShep. (Note, the romance scene in the alpha had around 90 lines of dialogue!!! Every line took an average of 10 hours to get functional.) Because fShep is how I play and what I personally envisage, my priority at the time was just about doing what was required for what I was most passionate about, as it was already a significant undertaking. However, things are different for LE. Audio is much easier, lipsync animation is fully automated now, and I'm frankly just much better at stuff than I was. Lines of dialogue take much less time now, and I can do both fShep and mShep's lines in less than a quarter of the time it used to take me to just do hers. Whilst mShep isn't my personal choice, he is for many of you, and so that's a good enough reason for me to include content for him. He's not a second-class citizen, either; I carefully slice up and stitch together his audio takes to sound as expressive as I can, just as I do to Jeff's and fShep's. Shoker in all its forms, bay-bee.